moodswings

(this ain’t a ‘moment’)

Robbie Burns Day – 2018

I gave this Toast to the Laddies at the home of Ken & Setenay, where we gather every year to celebrate the poetry of Robert Burns and others by reading aloud our favorite works. We march behind the haggis, drink scotch together, eat neeps and tatties, and fill our bowls from a vat of delicious vegetarian chili, anachronistically served. The fellow who was to give the Toast to the Lassies was unable to attend this year. So mine to the laddies was the only toast given. Because of its vulgarity, I did not read aloud the contents of the text message mentioned. That text message is reproduced here.

Well, lassies. Well, laddies. Fasten your seatbelts, because I’m going to get right to it.

It’s been strange days for the likes of us lately, hasn’t it? So much conflict, so much tension exposed in the news. So many secret crimes - against women and girls mostly - all in the open, all of a sudden. Never have we seen the laddies lose public esteem so precipitously, in such numbers. Key figures in sports, in culture, in politics. You know them. Bill Cosby. Louis CK. Poor, foolish Al Franken. Even Garrison Keillor.

How strange it all seems. How disorienting and upsetting. Setenay and I were talking over lunch about it, and that’s when she asked me to give tonight’s toast to the laddies. A toast to the laddies being the last thing, at the time, on my list of things I felt inspired to do.

So, being a contrary sort of woman, I said, ‘yes.’ This is my toast.

Here’s a story.

When I was nine, I was walking my little dog one morning, and a man drove up and called me over to ask for directions. I approached his car, and he had his dick out. It was surreal for a little girl, to see this homely object. I remember his pubic hair puffing out of his zipper. I had not seen pubic hair before. Or an erect penis. Both were unappetizing in the absolute. Gross. And frightening.

I walked away very fast, pulling my little pug-dog along by her leash. Again – I was nine. Of course, that was not the last such encounter I was to have, growing up in New York City. Far from it.

Here’s a different sort of story. Different, but still an example of what certain laddies feel entitled to do, or to say to a lassie. The sort of thing a lassie would never say to a laddie.

In 2017, a man I counted as a contemporary, fellow artist, and friend took me out for drinks. He was rattling on about his experiences on Tinder, his swipes, his hook-ups. I must have glazed-over because he stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said in all earnestness, ‘but, Amanda, at your age, you’re invisible, aren’t you?’

Later in 2017, my friend’s 25-year old grad student roommate sent me a text message with a sexual proposition so ugly, my friend expelled him from the household. The text read, ‘how are you? i wish i could come over and watch youtube in your bed and relax, then fuck you in front of your dogs.’

This roommate – I am old enough to be his mother. But he thought it was absolutely fine to assault me with a text message, for whatever uninvited reason, in 2017. This hyper-educated, professional young man.

So – between the ages of nine and 56 – there have been decades of this. These unprovoked shocks. And I am sharing here only the lighter fare. I’m leaving the physical violations out.

Another story, jumping back in time again. My first day in first grade, the first thing another student said to me was when the little boy sitting at the desk in front of me turned around and – apropos of nothing – declared, ‘I’m a boy, I’m better than you.’

He was telling me something I didn’t know yet. But he believed it. He was so certain. And I could feel a wound in me opening up. A question. Was this true?

Is this true?

He planted doubt in me that day, a terrible doubt. And the more I was in the world, the more that doubt was affirmed by the aggressive acts of other individuals and the persistent rigidity of cultural structures, the harder I pushed against it.

And I tell you now – the push has proved exhausting. And it never fucking ends. On the street, at home, at work. I look at my road ahead, and I feel despair. And if I told you, laddies – if any woman told you – if we were totally open and honest about our lives and what we endure year after year, lifetime after lifetime, you would want to tear the grass from the earth with your teeth.

Or – more likely – you simply wouldn’t believe us. You wouldn’t believe it could be as bad as all that.

Until, perhaps, now, with the #MeToo movement. Oh, the many sins of many men revealed, beloved heroes brought down by their misbegotten, unquestioned sense of what their rights are above the rights of the woman sitting beside them.

It’s crushing to hear about it all.

One feels – aha! At last.

One feels – oh no! I don’t want it to be true. I mean, I knew, I knew it was true. I just didn’t want it to be that true.

One feels – not vindication.

But nausea.

#MeToo has been such a big topic lately. I was at a holiday dinner with friends, and we were all talking about it. I spoke of some of my own #MeToo experiences, things that happened at work and elsewhere. A man at the table, tall, white, with liberal-looking hair, said, ‘your sample size is quite small.’

He said, ‘I have never abused a woman.’

He said, ‘I don’t know any man who has.’

He said, ‘I am a feminist.’

He said, ‘And – anyway – in your stories, what is the common denominator?’

The room looked at itself. Somebody said, ‘men?’

He said, ‘No. It’s Amanda. Amanda, it’s you. You are the common denominator. Your bad experiences are the result of your bad choices.’

The room froze.

And I said, ‘Fuck you.’

Quite firmly.

I then said, ‘Fuck you.’

The two best possible words. So good, I spoke them twice. I couldn’t believe I’d said them in a roomful of middle-aged, educated, mostly straight, mostly white, professional people. People just like us here tonight.

Vivek was the only person present who spoke up for me. Besides myself.

Later, as I was leaving, Bill made an aggressive apology. He caught up with me in the foyer. We were alone there. He was taller than I, and he kept stepping forward, into my space, looming, apologizing, trembling.

Trembling with what? With rage?

I said, ‘hang on now, you are pushing on me,’ and I put my hands up to indicate a physical boundary. He said, in a loud voice, ‘Oh, what – you’re the victim now? You’re the victim?’

I said, ‘Do I look like a victim to you?’ I grabbed my coat and left. Walking down the street, I found myself laughing aloud. I sat in my car, aghast & amazed. Laughing. Laughing. Laughing. The way we women do.

Because – well. Let’s look at what this feminist man said:

He said, ‘your sample size is quite small.’ Discrediting my data.

He said, ‘I have never abused a woman.’ Asserting his data.

He said, ‘I don’t know any man who has.’ Asserting his data.

He said, ‘I am a feminist.’ Asserting his superior expertise in the matter.

He said, ‘You are the common denominator. Your bad experiences are the result of your bad choices.’ Blaming the victim.

He said, ‘You’re the victim now?’ Here, he was apologizing.

VIvek also left the party and followed me home in his car. Once we got there, we embraced, laughing. Just dying of laughter. And I said to him – ‘now I get it. I finally understand what white fragility looks like.’

And it’s true. I get white fragility now. I got a lot out of that evening.

OK, look. The way women love is maternal. The way we lassies love you laddies, have always loved you laddies, is because of yourselves, of course. All of the wonderful things you are. But it is in spite of yourselves, too. We love you in spite of yourselves, as mothers will do. It is a big job. Don’t think it isn’t. You don’t always make it easy.

So, what kind of a goddamn toast is this? Is this not a moment to shower you all with praise?

No. That’s for every other night of the year.

Tonight, I am asking you laddies to give us lassies a new reason to toast you.

I know some of you. Maybe just a little, but enough to know something of what you have been through in recent times, how you have suffered. Bitterly suffered. The world is a beautiful, terrible place, and no one escapes the horror of its indifference. No one. I know how brave you have been. How strong. I know how you have stood firm for your work, for your communities and your families. I know some of you laddies to be quite principled. Soulful. Gentle. Generous to a fault. Kindly-natured and goodly-hearted. I know a few of you have daughters. And so, I am asking for more. Yes, more.

Typical lassie, asking for more. When will it end!

Here’s the thing.

I know the stories I’ve told tonight are hard to hear. But I’m not a celebrity. I’m not someone in the news. I am someone right here. I am with you.

It won’t do to back away from #MeToo, to disavow it, to say, ‘hey I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me, I would never.’

Brothers, This Ain’t All About You, Personally. There are others.

And it won’t do to say, ‘I don’t know men like that.’

Because, guess what, brothers. You do.

I am asking for you to shake off your hurt feelings if I’ve hurt them tonight, shake off your pride, trepidation and wariness, and to stand up for us, your women, your sisters, your own dear lassies. Don’t stand by while a woman is being belittled or mistreated – even if she isn’t in the room. Speak out.

Call out micro-aggressions as you see them, and macro-aggressions for that matter. Don’t let Vivek be the only guy to stand up for a woman in-a-spot. Hey – I know. I’m strong. I am an accomplished person. I have good posture. I speak well. I have wonderful hair. I look like the last woman on earth to need your help. But, sometimes I do.

We do.

This is about something other than chivalry. It’s about decency. It’s about showing up for the lassies. In a consistent, principled way. Out there. In here. It won’t be easy. We know this.

So, laddies, though you have given us lassies much, so much already - give us yet a new reason to toast you. Your opportunity will surely come.

In the meantime – I do lift my glass to you. I lift it in faith, in hope, and in motherly affection, for you are a promising bunch.

Pride & Vanity. Vanity & Pride. Both vying for precedence as The First Deadly Sin. How characteristic. Who, oh, who will win? Who would want to?

The rooster, the peacock, the Emperor in his new clothes. What are any of these without their haughty feathers or, for that matter, the mere idea of feathers? They are small, puny, naked things, mortified and ashamed. Pride always comes before a Fall. It’s just this side of Shame. Shame, which is not a Sin but the wooden nickel God gave us when he cast us out of the garden and into the world of Men without so much as a suit of clothes. How like an angry father. How quickly “I’m so proud of you” turns to “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

Pride is exclusive, which is to say it’s excluding. One of its etymological antecedents, the Latin ‘prodesse,’ breaks down into ‘pro’ which means forward and ‘esse’ meaning to be. ‘Pride,’literally meaning to be before. So Pride is what we do when we put ourselves ahead of others. Apart. Above. It is the antithesis of Love. Pride requires no accomplishments to bolster it. Pride is so elitist, so proud, it needs only its own idea of itself to be.

And Pride is not the same as Dignity. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were, on the whole, dignified. Their opposite numbers, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were – to a man – frighteningly proud. Those old twin cocks, Bush II and Blair, along with their bantam opponents, Hussein and bin Laden, were all proud, all dangerous people. I don’t think of them as dignified. Here’s another example: I recently watched the 1965 Cambridge Union Society debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, the subject of which was “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” To hear Baldwin’s oratory, its beauty and clarity and confidence and rage and compassion, is to experience a dignity that opens the heart and the mind in a way that is both arresting and welcome. To listen to poor Buckley’s response is to endure the pitiful pride and vanity necessary to the technical execution of the opposing argument. It’s embarrassing to behold. I can look back on President Obama’s presidency – whatever its successes and failings might be – as one that has been acquitted with consistent dignity. A Trump presidency will undoubtedly be one marked, perhaps even disfigured, by Pride. And who can consider Trump without also considering Vanity, denoting as it does excessive Pride, especially in one’s appearance. Vanity also means Futility, as in comb-overs and spray-tans.

Here’s a tale. When I was a young commercial producer, one of our ad agency’s clients had developed a Revolutionary New Product. Something they hoped mall America would praise God for the good of. This new and needful thing? Low-Fat Peanut Butter. It was the kind of peanut butter that had label-warnings written in teeny-tiny letters, letters so minuscule they are, in the trade, called mouse-type. I suppose this was because mice are the last creatures on earth innocent of the inter-webs and TV (even my dog watches golf) and so maintain their interest in reading. Well, what the mice were being warned against by this label was the possibility – the slight, slight chance, mind you – that once having eaten this low-fat peanut butter, they might experience severe abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and leakage.

Leakage.

There. I said it.

The peanut butter was, whimsically, called Peter Pan. Peter Pan Peanut Butter. You know it. It’s been a supermarket staple forever. But now, Low-Fat! There was a picture of Peter Pan on the label, looking mischievous and slightly cruel. The winking image of an elf evil enough to devise a diet peanut butter that induced leakage. What else did he have to be winking about, after all? Was his heavily lashed, batting eye a sexy come-on to Moms everywhere? Eat me, he might have been saying. You’re going to love it. Or was the perma-wink Peter Pan’s invitation for Mom to join in on a private joke, just the two of them. An inside joke, as it were. Deep inside.

It was the ad agency’s notion that - given a choice between Peter Pan Low-Fat and the fully-fatted peanut paste offered by the leading competitor, Skippy, anyone would choose Peter Pan in a blind taste test. The advertising line was, ‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to choose Peter Pan Low-Fat,’ or ‘You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to choose Peter Pan,’ ‘You don’t have to be a child prodigy,’ and so on. In other words, any idiot would be sure to choose Peter Pan Low-Fat and that idiot, ladies and gentleman, was you. The creative team wanted me, the agency producer, to find, not actors, but real, really remarkable people to do testimonials about the wonders of Peter Pan. That is, they wanted to find a nuclear physicist, for example, to hawk The Pan. These real, really remarkable people had to be geniuses and had to pick Peter Pan Low-Fat in a blind taste-test in order to be cast. The only other requirement was that none of them have an adversity to leakage.

Let me cut to the chase and say that I did find these people, including a child prodigy mathematician who was, at the age of 12, already starting classes at Harvard. Unfortunately, his name was Mohammad and, this being the time of the Gulf War under George I, the client was shy about having a little brown person hawking their little brown paste. They covered by saying that Mohammad didn’t depict their user demographic fairly. I’m sure they were right. I’m sure there’s not a teaspoon of low-fat peanut butter to be found in all the Islamic world to this very day. Rocket Scientists were grossly under-employed under George I, and so it was no problem finding one of those to be in our spot. A hungry astrophysicist will eat almost anything, it turns out.

The hardest thing to find by far was a female brain surgeon with spare time enough to have issued and raised two young children (as the storyboard demanded), who was herself youngish looking and reasonably attractive. Oh, eye surgeons were easily found. Lower GI specialists, yes. ENTs, innumerable. But brain surgeons? Female? At the time, I located fewer than 20 lady neurosurgeons in the entire United States. Of the three who agreed to the pre-screening taste-test, one had to cancel. And so we had just two on the casting tape to choose from. The first was heavy set and smiling but didn’t pick our butter. The other woman was a good-looking forty-something, whose beauty was only slightly ruined by many years of study and sawing through craniums and tinkering with the brain’s vague, yet precision machinery. Dedication, intelligence and warmth radiated in faint sprays of crows-feet around her huge, genius eyes. Her youthful ambition had once been expressed in a stern jaw-line, a jaw-line which her life-time’s experience had lately softened, giving her a look of gentle steadfastness. She looked, in short, exactly how I would want my own brain-surgeon to look. Like Susan Sarandon, circa The Banger Sisters. Incredibly, she genuinely liked Peter Pan Low-Fat: we had her on a date-stamped tape doing a blind taste test that proved it. And she said she would do the spot.

Anything to be on TV, she said.

And I had to wonder, “Even if it means getting a little crap in your pants?”

Six weeks later, we were ready to shoot. We had flown the brain surgeon and her two daughters in first class from New York to Vancouver and put them up in a suite. It was two days before the shoot and I, for one, was eager to meet our lovely lady-doctor face to face. Not to mention wardrobing her and her kids. But when I called her room to make an arrangement, she put me off. “I’m not a morning person,” she said. Well,I caved in. I didn’t want to pressure her unduly. She was not, after all, a professional actress. She was a brain surgeon. She put me off twice more, didn’t want to sit down with the director, didn’t want to join us for a get-acquainted drink. So it was that I did not meet our star performer - and what a performer she was - until the morning of the shoot.

At 5:00 AM, we were on location, shooting in one of those bland, California kitchens whose sunny, light oak cabinetry says ‘middle class,’ ‘average,’ and ‘this should be you but it never will be so shut up and watch.’ We had taken over most of the house, using the sunken living room as a holding pen for the client and agency people, while one of the bedrooms was being used for wardrobe, hair and makeup. From a distance, I saw the brain surgeon come in with her children, and observed as they were escorted down the hallway to dress. They seemed to scurry down that hallway as if into a rabbit-hole, moving a trifle too nimbly for the early hour. Too nimbly, I thought, for someone who was not, as the good doctor described herself, a morning person. 6:00 AM came ‘round, then 7. I noticed a PA hauling a 20-pound bag of ice into makeup. Strange, thought I. By then it was 8 AM. At 10:00, I could see by the schedule that we were meant to have gotten off our first shot a half-hour ago. Just as I had this realization, the makeup and hair people emerged in their smocks, looking oncologically grim. As they came closer, I knew the patient was me. The makeup man was weeping, and the hairstylist was doing her best to prop him up. Apparently, I was terminal.

“Shhhh, darling, it’s gonna be okay,” says the hairstylist. Then, turning to me, “It’s true what he says. He’s tried everything. Everything. I tried to cover up the scars with her hair, but it’s no good.”

Scars?

“Dis what I try tell you! The docto-lady haffhad a faceliff!”

The Doctor Lady Have Had A Face Lift. Very recently, it would seem.

The cost of the day’s filming amounted to 175,000 dollars. To cancel meant a total loss, compounded by the consequent loss of our editorial contract of 30,000 dollars, not to mention the media plan which amounted to a multi-million dollar national network buy. The good doctor wasn’t a SAG member, she wasn’t even an actress, so there was no agent to call, no union, no one for our client to blame but us, the agency. The burnt hair stink of a lawsuit swirled in my nostrils. Looking ‘round me, I saw clustered the director, his producer, cinematographer, my creative director, copywriter, account executive, all of them freaking out, not a one of them under 45, all staring at me, waiting for me to pronounce the patient dead. Either that, or drop dead myself. Well, I was 27 years old. I wanted to live.

Shoot her, I said.

At 10:30, the account executive took the client to lunch, and at noon, the brain surgeon was trotted out. Clearly, she was having a Clockwork Orange sort of day. For the most obvious symptom of her recent surgery was that she couldn’t close her eyes. The lids were peeled back tight by swelling and by the few tiny sutures still cunningly woven into her hairline. As the hours passed, one eye began to ooze. I ordered a production assistant designated to stand out of frame and pass her bunches of tissue to staunch the flow. All in all, the doctor’s performance that day was disturbingly unblinking.

Smiling, however, was not a problem. There was nothing but smiling all day long. She couldn’t fully close her lips and was, therefore, mouth-breathing under hot lights for hours at a time. Every so often, she’d dip her finger into a pot of Vaseline and rub it on her teeth to prevent her gob shriveling up entirely. Her smile stretched across her face in an inflexible, enigmatic leer. Was she happy? Rueful? Sardonically amused? I’ll never know. Her tenterhooked grin gave nothing away save itself, the perfect answer to Peter Pan’s own sexless, unprisable wink.

By the time the client returned to set, it was mid-afternoon, and much of the swelling had subsided, drained mostly, I believe, through that one eye. The cinematographer had moved his camera away from her and resorted to long lenses, favoring her good side, the one that wasn’t oozing. The lines she was meant to say were, where possible, given to the girls, who were filmed in heartwarming close-ups, mumbling our sticky scripture through mouthfuls of low-fat Peter Pan.

And it all came off. We got enough in-the-can to fashion thirty mediocre seconds of peanut-buttery pitch. And the story of our travail never leaked – pardon the expression. We never told. Not the advertising agency heads. Not our client. And certainly not the good doctor. For the biggest lie of the day was the lie we never told her. Which was this: that no one had noticed. Nobody saw. No one was frightened, inconvenienced, or remotely troubled by her stellar infraction. Her face-lift was never, ever mentioned to her. For, to acknowledge the too-obvious folly of her vanity, her pride in her own appearance, would have been to shame her. And a good performance must always, above all, be shameless.

I’ve since marveled at these events, and often. She’d had the facelift some time between the blind taste test and the shoot. I mean, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know a facelift can take a year to get over. How could she have done it? I wondered if she’d worked out a barter deal with the plastic surgeon: I’ll do your brain if you’ll do my face. But really, after conquering medical school, her internship, building her practice and professional reputation, could being on TV mean so much to her? Did she want the television audience to see her as she remembered herself as a young pre-med? Played by Rocky Horror era Susan Sarandon?

At the end of the shoot day, I escorted the doctor to her limousine. While we waited for her girls to come out of the bathroom, I leaned in through the limo’s open window, took her delicate, neurosurgeon’s hand in mine, gazed into her one dry eye and said, “Doctor, I’ve been meaning to ask … did you do something to your hair?” Just then her daughters ran out of the house, looking a trifle green. They clambered gingerly into the car, the both of them packed full of Peter Pan Low-Fat Peanut Butter, tight as a pair of water balloons. As I watched the limo drive off, I smiled to myself. And winked. “Peter Pan,” I thought, “Do your worst.” For I knew, whatever gastrointestinal misfortune befell her or her little girls that long, hot summer’s night, the good doctor wouldn’t dare make a peep about it.

Because Pride is not dignified. And Vanity never tells.

4.23.2016, Amanda Moody

A version of this story was originally performed in San Francisco as part of A Cellar Full of Noise's 7 Sins Series, directed by James B. Judd

In the diary entry following, are my notes taken while producing for an American ad agency, hired to make a campaign for OSKAR, formerly the Czech Republic’s national cell service. We had hired the theater & documentary film director, Alice Nellis, to direct our spots, all featuring real people. In 2003, the Czech Republic was only 13 years out of communism, the sharp smoke of which was still in everybody’s noses. But, also in evidence was the bright excitement of the young and - everywhere - the politically engaged. Václav Havel had served his two terms, and a new president was to be elected. Elections were held twice, and – for reasons I could not quite understand – it took a third election to elect Václav Klaus to the post. I remember sitting in a pub, swilling Pilsner excitedly with the Prague locals, watching the bar’s several televisions for the results. The thrill of the wait was palpable, and of a different character than here in the US, because – at least then – absent of bitterness, rancor and contempt. I could feel the pride, the brotherhood in the Czechs’ experience of their developing democracy. I smiled inside, thinking that the Czechs loved democracy so much they took a vote three times.

It is impossible to overestimate the value people placed on those elections. As a US citizen, I have known no other way to move our national leadership forward, backward or sideways. My opposite number, the EP at our Czech production company, took me for a long lunch one afternoon. After 50 minutes of dining and chat, I told him I was growing anxious to return to his offices to continue our work. He mocked my American-ness gently, told me our tasks would wait for us, admonishing me to enjoy myself for a few minutes more. Then he told me the story of when he was a young punk-rocker in Prague. Mohawks and dyed hair were not indulged there then. He was at the avant-garde of the counterculture. For real. He was picked up once by police because of his hair and tattoos and thrown in jail overnight. The next time he was taken, the cops cut off his hair, and scraped away his tattoos with a metal brush.

It was difficult to hear this story, sitting with this skilled and prosperous man in such a fine restaurant. But then I told him about how my father had ended up panhandling for food and loose change. How, at 60, he found himself destitute, but not destitute enough, or in the right way, such that there were no social services available to him. My father’s is a complicated tale, but that is the essence of it. It was difficult for my Czech producer to hear that story, nearly impossible for him to comprehend that such a thing could happen in the rich democracy where I was born. Where I’m from.

Here's my diary entry:

From Prague, with Love, 3/11/2003

I'm in a situation in Prague where I'm working nearly every day, but I have been taking a few notes about this town and what of it I'm able to see. Oh my but this has been a magic time, amazing on so many levels, creepy on a couple of mutant corporate levels, and mundane on at least 4 individual levels that I can think of offhand. Lots of hot chocolate, lots of spaghetti, lots of dogs, paving stones, puppets and Pilsner. We just completed four days of location shooting, real people, real animals (pets, that is) and now the editing begins. I think we've got about 20 or so hours of dv and 35mm to work with. Formidable task that, given the schedule, which is tight.

As for Prague, oh boy, oh boy, but this is truly my city: a City of Dogs. Canines rule here, unleashed, coddled, coddling, in restaurants, salons, and lobbies of every public place. And I haven't stepped in any poop yet. People here are famously fastidious - one takes shoes off in every family foyer. (And we were in quite a variety of these on the location scout.) Yes, the dogs are marvelous, a cheerful part of this formidable city landscape. As opposed to the puppets, which here proliferate in every shop and street stall: I have seen thousands of puppets, marionettes in the main, most of them ghoulish, many unsavory, none worth the price of the cheapest ticket to the meanest of bad dreams.

On the whole, the weather here has been uncharacteristically (I am told) clear, the cold air brilliant as diamonds, and as breathtaking. We Americans, a small pack of happy-go-lucky dogs, have brought the California sun to Prague, tied like a kite to our wagging backsides. And, dogs that we are, we eat like Kings at every turn, although some turns have been sharper than others and one does well to avoid them. For example, at an pan-Asian style restaurant which specializes in 'healthy' eating, I did not choose the 'Nightmare Soup' which, in addition to whatever particular stone, included shark fin and crocodile. At a fancier place, called Pravda (specializing in bizarre international gastronomical pastiche), I passed over the 'African' appetizer of Ostrich carpaccio served with parmesan, olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes. I also declined the 'African' special entrée of ostrich steak baked in a tortilla with potato purée, asparagus and truffle sauce. There was a moment when I began to wonder if ‘Africa’ was Czech for 'ostrich.' I decided not. Though at Pravda at least, Ostrich IS Africa. Last evening's restaurant was less ersatz in its approach to cuisine. I was tempted by a roast venison, but was put off my feed by the next offering on the menu: Horse.

Other curiosities:

There is no word in Czech for 'value.'

There is no phrase in Czech that expresses the stale admonishment ubiquitous in the US, and in our entertainment age, 'Enjoy!'

It's Sunday and we're making our first foray into the edit suite today. They did a best-light transfer to video (with the dp) of the 35mm and loaded it into AVID the day after the shoot. Alice Nellis (our director) started looking at all the footage on Friday, commenced editing Saturday, and will receive us today, I hope with some equanimity. Hers is a stern, yet humorous character. Since there are only about 10 feature-film directors making a living in the Czech Republic today and she - I believe - is the sole woman among them, Alice exhibits the goofy grandiosity of any large fish in a small pond. What else can be expected from someone who wins the film awards here every year when there is almost no one else to win them? With expressive freedom so new and welcome and sweet? It's an odd situation for any young person with artistic aspiration. Alice is amusing and very intelligent with an engaging charisma. Although she is inexperienced as far as making commercials, she grasps the strategies and client situations instantly, developing her own stratagems about them and articulating her thoughts beautifully. I will see what the film looks like for the first time today, but - judging from the wittily orchestrated chaos of the shoots - I have every confidence it will be tops.

On the other hand, Alice does not listen easily. It's really quite funny to observe, once one gets past what looks like rudeness. Simply put, one cannot stop her from talking. Ever. And while she occasionally stops to breathe (into which intervals one leaps waving whatever idea overhead like a tattered white flag) she never stops to really hear her interlocutor. This happens again and again, not just with Alice, but with lots of folks around here. It's a kind of social deafness. Combined with a limitless capacity to talk one to death. Many Czechs I’ve met seem prone to this sandbagging, which - perplexingly - can also take the form of long silences.

Could it be born out of Czechs having had so little for so long? Perhaps one holds fast to everything here, even the ephemera of one's own ideas, because even these - not so long ago - might be carted away.

Alice Nellis with her dear wolfhound, in the mixing studio

There is also extraordinary corporate rigidity, which is clearly and intimidatingly evident even within a progressive entity like our client's. It's bureaucratic beyond anything I’ve experienced at P&G or Hunt-Wesson. Some days I do feel I'm turning into a cockroach while, inside, my tiny cockroach soul cries out, "Somebody! Step on me, please!!!" For instance, the idea of a project, its means and goals, evolving naturally as we go, is beyond the immediate scope of many among our Czech clients. Always we come back to, "But we agreed ..." "But you said ..." "You promised ..." Such accusations are accompanied by old boards, evidentiary e-mails, notes scribbled on bathroom walls and so forth. Nor do the corporate people ever assume direct responsibility for anything. Early in the game, I tried to hand a production invoice to one of our clients who threw up her hands and backed away from me as if I were handing her a pile of shit on a tea-tray. "No, no!" she protested, "this must be given to so-and-so and STAMPED." Official Stampings by Official Stampers are very big here. Stapled documents are tape-sealed over the staple and stamped. Restaurant receipts are stamped. Even the toilet paper rolls at the hotel are stickered shut with an insignia.

Then there is the slightly brooding quality of people. "I am from Bosnia," the cost-controller told me within the first eight minutes of our meeting. We were alone together, reviewing the production contract. "We had a war." His eyes were an agony to behold. Long silence. Something in the conference room creaked. I took a deep breath and replied, 'Right. And what about item 2A-ii, Contract Specifications?'

And finally, there is the obvious brilliance and attractiveness of everyone I meet. Which brings me to the most curious thing about this production, at the heart of which has always been using Real People instead of professional actors. Czechs talk about other Czechs as if they were describing a convention of funeral directors: "Oh, no one will come to these auditions. No one will pose for the camera. No one will smile. Casting will be impossible." There was a complex of social/historical reasons given for this, which the agency guys and I found unsettlingly credible. We wondered why our client ever would have agreed to signing up for a Real People shoot when obviously no real people were to be had. And yet, our casting sessions were FANTASTIC. I fell in love with every new group that walked in. Everyone was so game. So present. Vulnerable. The casts we wound up with are a delight.

In other news, yesterday morning, a nineteen-year-old boy soaked himself in gasoline, lit a match and burned himself to death at the top of Wenceslas Square. He left a long letter behind, citing his horror of the oncoming war on Iraq. Similar self-immolations protested the Russians in '68, and we all wondered last evening if this young fellow deliberately was linking himself to those furious suicides. The most infamous of these was Jan Palac's in '69, protesting the suppression of the Prague Spring and the accession of the Communists. Flowers and candles are still laid out on the spot where Palac died. Now another corpse honors him. What a place we've made the world, where a boy, not yet twenty, feels a hellish death serves him better than to walk about with us here.

I was in a pub when that story was told me. We were celebrating our wrap party. There were fried potato cakes, fried anchovies (which are eaten by the handful and are addictive in the way of McDonald's french fries), apple strudel, cheese, fruit salad, salmon spread, toast and so forth. Huge steins of Pilsner were handed 'round, and Stolichnaya vodka - unchilled - which I sampled and found delicious. One of the crew truck drivers has a French bulldog named UFO (pronounced Oof-oh), white with black spots dropped like ashes on her ears. She was at the party too, squat and dusty, stubbed out like a cigarette on a tall bar stool, looking on with sleepy beneficence. She's deaf as a post, which contributes to her Bodhisattva-like aspect, since nothing anyone says can offend her. In addition to the rest of the cast and crew, two professional folk dancers we'd hired for the shoot were at the pub. They disappeared briefly, reentering our midst wearing gorgeous folk dress, floating in on village tunes that would have made Stravinsky green. And they danced together, this boy and girl, and danced, and danced and they were enchanting. Watching their beauty, their freshness, their skill, I felt all warm and sticky inside. I loved feeling drawn along the ravel of a golden thread, through Time's tiny eye, where past is made present and perfect and real. What have we got at home that can can drop the ancient, like a new kitten, into our laps? I can't think of anything there living that can.

Burning boys, dancing boys, begging boys - some flesh, others stone - every city block in Prague is a universe. The architecture here, the statuary stuck onto every doorjamb, all so dense, so rich. And then the awful communist era cinderblock monstrosities. The People's Movement certainly left nothing for the people to enjoy. And - while the beaux arte, old stuff puts me in my place, makes me feel small yet part of something large and lasting, the contemporary stuff just makes me feel miserable. Stand next to one of those unadorned, crumbling monoliths and you definitely feel the cold.

And here I am, a dot of soot blowing along the dreary banks of panelak housing. I am running across the Karluv most. Standing stock still in the centre of Staromestké náme sti. I am wearing a thin red coat in the snow, my chapped, blue knuckles gripping tight the places where the buttons have dropped off. They rattle in my pockets. And I am having a rare adventure, my California shoes made foolish on the sly, cobblestoned streets. Maps (and high heels) are useless here. One simply steps into the city, takes a deep breath, and hopes for the best.